A good piece of news is that Sri Lanka’s annual share of global CO₂ emissions remains very low.
In 2020, it was a mere 0.06%. Still, the sudden rise in this share beginning in 1995 (at 0.02%) is a cause for concern having remained at 0.02% from 1950. The 45-year trend reversed in 1995 and by 2020, it surged by 300%. Sri Lanka’s share of global cumulative CO₂ emissions that was at 0.01% in 1960 grew to 0.03% by 2020.
According to ourworldindata.org, 80% of the world’s energy comes from fossil fuels – the single largest source of global temperature rise..!
“The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has found that emissions from fossil fuels are the dominant cause of global warming. In 2018, 89% of global CO2 emissions came from fossil fuels and industry. Coal is a fossil fuel, and is the dirtiest of them all, responsible for over 0.3C of the 1C increase in global average temperatures. This makes it the single largest source of global temperature rise..” – www.clientearth.org
In Sri Lanka, the highest increase in emissions have been recorded by fossil fuel oils. Its CO2 emissions at 3.66 million tonnes in 1990 increased by 287% by 2020 (to 13.3 million tonnes). The second largest growth is seen in coal usage.
Burning of fossil fuels is not the only cause for emissions in Sri Lanka. There are other offenders contributing to emissions as well.
In 2020, of the total 21.11 million tonnes of emission in Sri Lanka, 63% came from fossil fuels while 29% was from coal. Only 5% emissions were cement production related. The pattern of change of these sources over years shows important trends – ALL types of emissions have increased by 2020.
As demand for electricity grows everywhere, burning of coal increases.
“Today, there are around 8,500 coal power plants in operation worldwide. At more than 2,000 gigawatts of capacity they generate over a third of all electricity. Coal power plants produce a fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions – more than any other single source. And while cutting emissions has become a key global priority, more than 300 new coal power plants are slated to come online in the coming five years. .” – Fatih Birol And David Malpass- It’s critical to tackle coal emissions –in blogs.worldbank.org
Emissions from burning of coal had been minimal till 2010 – at around 227,000 tonnes. A sudden increase in emissions from 2010 onwards (a massive 2840% by 2020 to 6.68 million tonnes) resulted in coal increasingly becoming another problematic source in Sri Lanka’s greenhouse emissions.
Cement / concrete is the “less known greenhouse gas polluter” in the world. A leading policy institute, Chatham House, revealed that cement to be causing 8% of the world’s CO₂ emissions.
“..global cement production is set to increase to over 5 billion tonnes a year over the next 30 years.2 Rapid urbanization and economic development in regions such as Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa will increase demand for new buildings, and thus for concrete and cement. With as many as 3 billion people potentially living in slums by 2050, new rapidly deployable housing solutions are urgently needed..” – Johanna Lehne & Felix Preston- Making Concrete Change: Innovation in Low-carbon Cement and Concrete – www.chathamhouse.org
Sri Lanka’s cement production emissions that were at 153,000 tonnes until 1990 slowly but steadily increased by 600% to 1.08 million in 2020.
